On a summer’s day in 2008, physics student Ahmet Yildiz, 26, was shot dead when he popped out of his Istanbul apartment to buy ice cream. The main suspect in the killing, a fugitive still wanted by Turkish police, is Yildiz’s father, who could not accept that his only son was in a homosexual relationship.
The case, believed to be Turkey’s first gay “honour killing”, has inspired a movie Zenne Dancer, which opened on January 13 and explores gay sexual identity and prejudice in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey.
“We had the idea in mind right after our dear friend Ahmet was killed,” said Caner Alper, writer and co-director of the movie. “His story needed to be told.”
Yildiz was born into a wealthy religious family in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, in Turkey’s impoverished and conservative south east, but moved to cosmopolitan Istanbul during his university years, seeking more freedom as a gay man.
He started a new life and made new friends. He began a gay relationship and eventually moved in with his boyfriend, who witnessed Yildiz’s murder from the window of their apartment.
In the movie, Yildiz’s character is encouraged to come out of the closet by a male belly dancer, or zenne, and a German photographer who has moved to Istanbul after a personal crisis in Afghanistan, where he accidentally caused the death of several children during a photo shoot.
Both are fictional characters.
In real life, Yildiz’s coming out as a gay man was seen as an affront in his deeply patriarchal and tribal family, even though his parents adored him, a cousin, Ahmet Kaya, told the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.
Yildiz’s father had urged him to return to their village and to see a doctor and an imam to “cure” him of his homosexuality and get married, but Yildiz refused.
“Ahmet loved his family more than anything else and he was tortured about disappointing them,” Kaya was quoted as saying.
After he was killed, the family did not claim Yildiz’s body for a proper Islamic burial – an indication of their shame and that they had disowned him. He was buried in a “cemetery for the nameless”.
“The one scene I wasn’t able to distance myself from the character I played as an actor was when Ahmet apologised to his father on the phone for being gay after coming out,” Erkan Avci, a young actor who played Yildiz, told Reuters. “It’s such a great tragedy, so cruel and inhumane that anybody has to apologise for who he is.”
Avci drew parallels between Ahmet’s situation and his own as a Kurd from Diyarbakir in a country whose Kurdish minority suffers discrimination and inequality.
“It would have been immoral for me to turn down this role as a man who had to apologise for years for being Kurdish,” he said.
Zenne Dancer, which won five awards at Turkey’s most prestigious film festival, the Antalya Golden Orange, has received a huge amount of attention in the media and is reported to be successful at the box office. With a $1 million budget, including financial support from the Dutch embassy, it opened in a luxury movie theatre in one of Istanbul’s most fashionable areas.
Gays are normally depicted in Turkish movies as colourful and exaggerated secondary characters who add a comic element – hardly the main character of a story.
Zenne Dancer tackles head-on sensitive issues like gay society, prejudice and equal rights for Turkey’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
The film has not been welcomed in conservative circles.
Islamist daily Vakit called it “homosexual propaganda” by a gay lobby bent on “legitimising perversion through so-called art”. – Reuters